Veteran Texas landscape painters keep getting better

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, April 9, 2009

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Road to Utopia, 2008, by Richard Stout

Road to Utopia, 2008, by Richard Stout

Veteran Texas landscape painters keep getting better

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Fans of Texas landscape painting are in luck this month, with two veteran artists and former University of Houston colleagues, Richard Stout and William Anzalone, presenting strong solo exhibitions at Houston galleries.

At William Reaves Fine Art, Richard Stout: Gulf Coast Communion offers more than 35 examples — one dating as far back as 1950, when the artist was 16, another completed as recently as last week — of Stout’s coastal explorations on canvas and paper. It’s been a richly multifaceted journey, characterized by a restless engagement with what he describes as the Gulf Coast’s “uncomfortable light, a holy light having to do with pain.”

Always going beyond literal representation but never quite settling into abstraction, Stout has seemingly explored every inch of territory between those two poles. A sense of place is uncanny even in the works with the least superficial resemblance to their subjects, but so is the physicality of paint and mark making.

“What we see are oddly angled, vertiginous space and variegated light and color that can sneak up on us,” writes Susie Kalil in a sensitive, perceptive catalog essay. “Significantly, the paintings have a life altogether their own distinct from the circumstances they depict. … We move from the sharp contour of paint to the large geometry of forms, weaving in and out of mottled flickerings of light, which bring us back again to the palpable vehicle of paint.”

Stout already was a frighteningly good painter when he was in his 20s, and he has shown no signs of slowing down. One magical moment in this exhibition is to study a trio of untitled watercolors from 1961, then to shift your attention to a nearby trio of mixed-media works on paper from this year. Both groupings are wonderful and convey a world wider and grander than their diminutive sizes would suggest, but he’s not repeating himself.

In fact, Stout seems to keep getting better with longevity. Several of my favorites in this show were made in the past five years, including Night Fishing (2004); Morning (2006); the incredible Road to Utopia (2008), a mysterious harbinger of an approaching storm that fuses painting and drawing; and Night, the one Stout finished last week — an exquisite oil of a nocturnal view from a window.

William Anzalone

At Meredith Long & Co., Anzalone is celebrating his 50-year relationship with the gallery — an association barely younger than the gallery itself — with a body of recent work rather than a career survey.

Since the late 1980s — and especially since retiring from UH in 1994 — Anzalone, who previously had painted abstractions and the figure, has concentrated on the landscape near Round Top.

“I was a natural teacher, and I liked it,” he told Southwest Art magazine in 2006. “But teaching is not a good way to support yourself as a painter if you’re serious about teaching, which I was. The intellectual demands of teaching are rigorous, and you have to stay up to date with what’s going on in the art world.”

It looks like these days Anzalone paints to please himself, art world be damned. And why not? Sure, there’s something 19th-century about his approach to landscape painting — shades of Impressionism with the otherworldliness of Paul Gauguin’s palette thrown in — but when it’s done as expertly as Anzalone does it in works such as AftergloworLouise’s Gate, Moonrise, no apology is needed.